Regarding Cadi's thread...
Pretty much what Mouse said right here and what Lythe said up above is what I thought the plan was. Rhocanth and I had talked in IRC with a few other people from the group, and we'd decided that a good way to kick off the thread would be to have one of the scout-type characters stumble upon the bandit attack, and then alert the rest of the party. Then we'd all jump right in there and kick ass. A couple of people had volunteered their characters for the scout job to start the thread off, so that might have been a point of confusion.
I think people might also have been confused because of me. I personally had been surprised because I could have sworn we'd agreed we'd do a camp/travel scene before Cadi's thread, so the characters that hadn't met each other yet could do so before the plot got rolling. So, when Cadi's thread popped up, I went, "Whaaat." I brought it up in IRC that I was a little uncomfortable jumping straight into plot stuff with characters that didn't know each other, but since I was the only person bothered by it, I was just going to PM people and establish facts that way, rather than holding everyone up by asking for a camp backscene just for my own benefit. Still that could be another reason people were holding back, because of me.